1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to games for the gaming industry and methods therefor and, more specifically, to a new poker game and method therefor which allows each player to select his or her own poker hand.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Various forms of games of chance are played throughout the world (i.e., poker, blackjack, etc.). The problem with each of these different games is that the participant has no freedom as to the cards which are dealt to them. Either a computer or a dealer will select and deal a card or cards to each participant. Participants are always complaining that the dealer or computer dealt them a bad hand or did not give them the card or cards that he or she needed.
With specific regard to playing poker which has become a challenging game to poker players, there are essentially two general types of poker games. One type is known as "live" poker where a person plays against other players and there is one dealer (either a casino dealer or one of the poker players) who distributes the cards in a clockwise manner from one player to the other players. The other type of the two types of poker games is "video" poker where each player will sit in front of a video screen and press certain buttons to receive cards, to select which cards to hold (if any are desired to be held) and to draw new cards to replace the cards not selected to be hold of the original five cards initially received for each hand of poker.
As stated earlier, the player (in either of these two types of poker games) can't select the cards to be given to the player. For the video poker game, the cards are selected internally by computer from a random number generator and, therefore, the video poker player will only receive those cards selected each time by the computer (microprocessor) in the video poker game.
Therefore, a need existed to provide a new poker game and method therefor which would provide a poker player with a positive choice in the selection of the cards to be received by the poker player. The new poker game and method will allow individual players to select their own starting hand by selecting a predetermined number of initial playing cards from a set of 52 playing cards lying face down. The now poker game and method will further allow the individual players to discard and select replacement cards from the remaining playing cards that are lying face down. Thus, in the example of a video poker game, each individual player can select their own initial five playing cards and, after these five playing cards are disclosed to the player, then have the option of selecting one or more replacement cards for these five initial playing cards.